Adding Direct Send for Office 365

Choose this option when you only need to send messages to recipients in your own organization who have with mailboxes in Office 365; you don’t need to send email to people outside of your organization.

Other scenarios when direct send may be your best choice:

You want your device or application to send from each user’s email address and do not want each user’s mailbox credentials configured to use SMTP client submission. Direct send allows each user in your organization to send email using their own address.

Avoid using a single mailbox with Send As permissions for all your users. This method is not supported because of complexity and potential issues.

You want to send bulk email or newsletters. Office 365 does not allow you to do this via SMTP client submission. Direct send allows you to send a high volume of messages.

Note that there is a risk of your email being marked as spam by Office 365. You might want to enlist the help of a bulk email provider to assist you. For example, they’ll help you adhere to best practices, and can help ensure that your domains and IP addresses are not blocked by others on the Internet.

Settings for direct send

If your device or application can send from a static public IP address, obtain this IP address and make a note of it. You can share your static IP address with other devices and users, but don’t share the IP address with anyone outside of your company. Your device or application can send from a dynamic or shared IP address but messages are more prone to antispam filtering.

Go to the device, and in the settings, under what would normally be called Server or Smart Host, enter the MX record of you office 365 service

Now that you are done configuring your device settings, go to your domain registrar’s website to update your DNS records. Edit your sender policy framework (SPF) record. In the entry, include the public IP address of your internet connection. The finished string looks similar to this:

v=spf1 ip4:10.5.3.2 include:spf.protection.outlook.com ~all

where 10.5.3.2 is your public IP address.

NOTE: Skipping this step might cause email to be sent to recipients’ junk mail folders. To reduce the chance of your emails going into junk, you can also enter your public IP address and the internal IP address of the device into the “Allowed IP Address” list in the “Connection Filtering” section in “Protection”.

To test the configuration, send a test email from your device or application, and confirm that the recipient received it.